In this lesson from Tom Graham’s free course, you’re going to learn how to create and export captions and subtitles using Premiere Pro.
With your video opened in Premiere Pro, go to the Captions and Graphics Tab in the menu. Next, go to Text in the Source panel.
Here you have three options. You can:
- Transcribe Sequence
- Create New Caption Track
- Import Captions from File
1. Create New Caption Track
- Let’s start by creating a New Caption Track. When you click on that option, it opens a dialogue window.
- Choose Subtitle under Format and hit OK. This will add a subtitle track to the top of your timeline.
- Drag your playhead to the start of your clip and hit the Spacebar to listen to the video, and then hit the Spacebar again to stop the video.
- Go to the Source panel and hit the Plus button to add a New Caption Segment. Type the text and line it up with the appropriate section of your video. There is an easier way to do this, and that’s by using Transcribe Sequence. We’ll look at that next.
2. Transcribe Sequence
- Go to Transcript in the Source panel > Create Transcription.
- From the dialogue window, choose Mix under Transcription Settings > Transcribe.
- Your transcribed text will show up in the Source panel, and you can check it and correct any mistakes there.
- Hit Create Captions. This will bring up a dialogue window. Select Create from Sequence Transcript. Leave the Subtitle and other settings at the default, and choose whether you want your captions as single or double lines. Hit Create.
- Once the transcription process is complete, you will see the text from your video in the Text panel. The caption segments will be positioned on the timeline, accurately matching the pace of speech in the video.
- You can fine-tune the appearance of your captions using the tools in the Essential Graphics panel and even save your settings as a preset to customise all your captions consistently.
- When you are ready to export your video, highlight your in and out points in the timeline and hit Command-M, which will open the Export Settings page. Scroll down and go to the Captions tab. In Export Options, you have three choices.
- You can choose Burn the Captions Into Video, which will keep them on the screen with the video no matter what. Create Sidecar File means the video will be exported with a specific subtitle file as well, or an SRT. None will give you a non-subtitled version of the video.
- You can also choose to include any styling you’ve added. When you are done, hit Export.
More Premiere Pro Resources
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial on how to use captions in Premiere Pro. Here are more top Premiere Pro tutorials and resources to try from Envato Tuts+:
